Precaria ex Humanitas

Precaria is a two member band from Mexico, who began to write music since 2004 but they didn’t manage to release their first demo until 2013. “Precaria ex Humanitas” is the band’s first full length album, which was released in April of 2014 and it contains six tracks of overall duration of about fifty three minutes. Precaria is one of those bands, which demand the absolute concentration of the listener during the listen of the album, in order to manage to get into the spirit and catch what the album can offer to him. Their music is fast, violent and it hides elements from various scenes and schools of Black Metal.

Surely what the listener will notice, by the first track already, is a mixture of European with Latin American sound. So, the listener will come across tremolo, long riffs with the characteristic Scandinavian elements and the chaotic, with the disharmonic melodies and the “ugly” sounds of “orthodox” Black Metal sound, combined with the characteristic heavy and barbaric riffing and the dirty, dark and chaotic atmosphere of the Latin American school. The result of this mixture is on one hand quite difficult for the listener, as it demands his uninterrupted attention, but on the other it is quite interesting. What makes the listen more difficult is the huge length of the tracks. With a duration over the ten minutes each, even if they had a perfect structure, the parts that would be tedious for the listener, they would be present again. Unfortunately, here the structure although it is quite good, it is not perfect. So there are parts which are repeated more than they should be and others that become tedious.

The performance of the instruments is a high level one. The guitars are the ruling instrument in the compositions with their other times dirty, heavy, dark, repetitive sound and other times with the “ugly”, chaotic, disharmonic one, they create the intense atmosphere of the compositions and they deliver the gloomy images to the listener. Just after the guitars I have to mention the flawless in any aspect drums. They have very interesting lines, with beautiful changes, atmospheric passages and violent outbursts, all of them performed with flawless technic, much passion and intensity. Finally, the vocals are another part of the album that is distinguished. They are heavy Black/Death vocals, absolutely insane and barbaric, they offer even more energy to the compositions. The bass is not clearly audible. The production is dark and dirty, combined with the very good mixture, the sound that comes out, fits perfectly with the compositions and at the same time it doesn’t make the listen difficult. The lyrics are written in Spanish and if I judge by the impressive cover and the artwork, as also by the music, they must express misanthropic feelings and ideas.

To sum up, I believe that Precaria have offered a very interesting album. The combination of the two kinds of sound, that of the European and that of the Latin American, is done in a way that it shows that it comes out naturally from their soul, a fact that makes them special. For sure there are a lot of elements that must be improved by the band for their future releases, for example the matter of structure or the big duration of the tracks. However here we have a mentionable effort which deserves your attention.